If I'm not a best-selling author by tomorrow I give up. Period.

I am in the part of job hunting that requires me to gather my "clips" or samples of stuff I've written.

I spent at least an hour and two dollars at the public library yesterday, hunting for archives of my articles and then trying to make legible copies. This was a pain the ass and disheartening work.

A pain because if I'd kept my own tidy folder of clips as I kept meaning to do, I wouldn't have to go to the library, find my articles and then pay $0.15 per copy. Also, if my company's web site were halfway decent, ALL of my articles would appear in the electronic archives and NONE of the words would get all jumbly and alphabet-soupy towards the end. But alas, I am not organized and neither is the company I work for.

Disheartening because most of my articles suck. This is not me being sorry for myself. It's simply the God's honest truth. Somewhere between graduating from college and landing my first *writing* job, I convinced myself that I was a pretty darn good writer, or at least had potential. Uh-uh. There's so much to be improved and I can't believe half the stuff got published. Also, I didn't write nearly as many articles as I thought I had. In fact, as I flipped through past issues, I felt like punching myself. What was I doing all that time I wasn't writing? Probably moping around the office feeling sorry for myself, hating the management, not thinking of story ideas and not writing.

I am pretty terrible, I think, when it comes to coming up with ideas. Blame the Asian upbringing. Give us an idea and we can perfect it. Ask us to invent something and we're screwed.

So this is where I am in the "looking for a new job" phase: Convinced I won't get hired and if I do, I'll really be wondering about the employer.